Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Change is Coming: Pre-adaptability for a Resilient City(2020) Omidvar, Ava Toosi; Williams, Joseph C; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since its inception, the Earth has been a living and evolving planet. Phenomena such as tectonic plates shifting and changes in the atmosphere have caused our ecosystems to change and evolve by natural events. Humans have been part of this ecosystem for the past 2.1 million years but have only stopped their nomadic way of life and built village settlements 10,000 years ago. Civilizations have faced many natural and human-made disasters forcing them to renovate, rebuild, or relocate. However, the frequency of these disasters through climate change will exacerbate these transformations. For many cities around the world where landscapes are being permanently affected by climate-induced landscape change, the built environment has the responsibility to adapt. How can architecture allow for change over time? When we know that intermittent floods are becoming more detrimental, how must we build our cities to prepare for living with water?Item Here to Stay: The Disaster, Displacement, and Biomimetic Response(2020) Lorenzana, Dan; Hu, Ming; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Natural disaster can be felt all around the globe especially in the Philippines where millions of people have been displaced without any shelter. With the average of 20 typhoons hitting Philippines each year. People are still living in unsafe structures that affects the day to day of their livelihoods during and after natural disaster. According to Internal Displacement, earthquakes, floods and violence have driven millions away from their homes in 2018 alone. This acceleration in displacement can be felt in cities with growing slums and outdated infrastructure. This thesis will investigate a new integrated urban and building design typology for climate adaptation that uses and integrates Biomimicry as a design technique. This exploration hopes to use as a establish design criteria in the Philippines where typhoon is very prominent.Item SURVIVING THE STORM: AN INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS OF HURRICANE KATRINA’S EFFECT ON LINGERING PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HEALTH DISPARITIES(2020) DeLoatch, Nicole T.; Rendall, Michael S; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This three-paper dissertation used an intersectional analytical framework to examine disparities in physical health and mental health (respectively) for Hurricane Katrina survivors by race and gender. To do so, health outcomes for New Orleans residents who survived Hurricane Katrina were analyzed. Displaced New Orleans Resident Survey (DNORS) data was used to investigate if natural disasters exacerbate health disparities. In Chapter 2, eight waves of self-reported data from the nationally-representative Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) were used to conduct a sensitivity analysis of self-reported diagnoses. This was done to determine if there are differences by race and sex in the accuracy of self-reports. Chapter 2's analysis indicates that the intersections of race and sex were not associated with reporting variability after accounting for proxy status and class related characteristics. In Chapters 3 and 4, we determine if significant increases to physical and mental health diagnosis vary by race and sex, following Hurricane Katrina. The main finding of Chapter 3 was that Black women were more likely to report negative physical health outcomes than their White or male counterparts, both before and after Hurricane Katrina. Chapter 4's main finding was that Black women were not more likely to report a diagnosis of negative emotional problem and depression post-Katrina when compared to their White or male counterparts. There were increased adverse mental health outcomes across all four race-sex groups.Item Enhancing Decision-making in Smart and Connected Communities with Digital Traces(2019) Hong, Lingzi; Frias-Martinez, Vanessa; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The ubiquitous use of information communication technologies (ICTs) enables generation of digital traces associated with human behaviors at unprecedented breadth, depth, and scale. Large-scale digital traces provide the potential to understand population behaviors automatically, including the characterization of how individuals interact with the physical environment. As a result, the use of digital traces generated by humans might mitigate some of the challenges associated to the use of surveys to understand human behaviors such as, high cost in collecting information, lack of quality real-time information, and hard to capture behavioral level information. In this dissertation, I study how to extract information from digital traces to characterize human behavior in the built environment; and how to use such information to enhance decision-making processes in the area of Smart and Connected Communities. Specifically, I present three case studies that aim at using data-driven methods for decision-making in Smart and Connected Communities. First, I discuss data-driven methods for socioeconomic development with a focus on inference of socioeconomic maps with cell phone data. Second, I present data-driven methods for emergency preparedness and response, with a focus on understanding user needs in different communities with geotagged social media data. Third, I describe data-driven methods for migration studies, focusing on characterizing the post-migration behaviors of internal migrants with cell phone data. In these case studies, I present data-driven frameworks that integrate innovative behavior modeling approaches to help solve decision-making questions using digital traces. The explored methods enhance our understanding of how to model and explain population behavior patterns in different physical and socioeconomic contexts. The methods also have practical significance in terms of how decision-making can become cost-effective and efficient with the help of data-driven methods.Item IMPROVING RESILIENCE OF RAIL-BASED INTERMODAL FREIGHT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS(2013) Zhang, Xiaodong; Miller-Hooks, Elise; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)With the increasing natural and human-made disasters, the risk of an event with potential to cause major disruption to our transportation systems and their components also increases. It is of paramount importance that transportation systems could be effectively recovered, thus economic loss due to the disasters can be minimized. This dissertation addresses the optimization problems for transportation system performance measurement, decision-making on pre-disaster preparedness and post-event recovery actions planning and scheduling to achieve the maximum network resilience level. In assessing a network's potential performance given possible future disruptions, one must recognize the contributions of the network's inherent ability to cope with disruption via its topological and operational attributes and potential actions that can be taken in the immediate aftermath of such an event. A two-stage stochastic program is formulated to solve the problem of measuring a network's maximum resilience level and simultaneously determining the optimal set of preparedness and recovery actions necessary to achieve this level under budget and level-of-service constraints. An exact methodology, employing the integer L-shaped method and Monte Carlo simulation, is proposed for its solution. In this dissertation, a nonlinear, stochastic, time-dependent integer program is proposed, from operational perspective, to schedule short-term recovery activities to maximize transportation network resilience. Two solution methods are proposed, both employing a decomposition approach to eliminate nonlinearities of the formulation. The first is an exact decomposition with branch-and-cut methodology, and the second is a hybrid genetic algorithm that evaluates each chromosome's fitness based on optimal objective values to the time-dependent maximum flow subproblem. Algorithm performance is also assessed on a test network. Finally, this dissertation studies the role of network topology in resilience. 17 specific network topologies were selected for network resilience analysis. Simple graph structures with 9~10 nodes and larger network with 100 nodes are assessed. Resilience is measured in terms of throughput and connectivity and average reciprocal distance. The integer L-shaped method is applied again to study the performance of the network structure with respect to all three resilience measures. The relationships between resilience and average degree, diameter, and cyclicity are also investigated.Item COMPLEXITY IN DISASTERS: A CASE STUDY OF THE HAITIAN EARTHQUAKE RESPONSE(2011) Connor, David J.; Toth, Elizabeth; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This case study explores the development of an international crisis response from the perspective of the United States Coast Guard (USCG). Crisis managers, responders, and communicators from the USCG and from partner agencies were interviewed, as well as representatives from the Haitian publics of the response. The resulting narrative was used to test the previously untested Situational Theory of Problem Solving (STPS) and complexity theory, which had not previously been applied to international disaster response. Findings validated both theories and demonstrated the importance of cultural translators in effecting international disaster response. This study served as a preliminary test of STPS, and a first international application of complexity theory. Practical implications include guidance for crisis managers on how to respond to crises in a complex world, as well as how to harness cultural awareness when responding internationally.